Life on the Leash by Victoria Schade

My Rating ~ Three stars

RELEASED: 1 December 2018

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Format: paperback

Pages: 345

Blurb

Cora Bellamy is a woman who thrives on organization. She’s successfully run her own dog training business for years, perfectly content with her beloved rescue pitbull as the main man in her life. She’s given everything to her business, and her lack of social life (or slobber-free clothes) has been completely worth it.

But all that changes when she meets Charlie Gill, the hottest client she’s ever had. The only problem? Charlie’s taken. Luckily, Cora has a new friend—the sweet, lovably geeky Eli Crawford. More loyal than a retriever, he’s always there to help Cora with her problems, including her love life. That’s why she’s shocked to realize that even as things start heating up with Charlie, there might just be a more-than-friends spark between her and Eli, too.

As Cora’s life gets more tangled up than a dogwalker’s leashes—and as she prepares to audition for a dog-training TV show that may irrevocably change her entire life—she has to figure things out before it all goes straight to the dogs.

Review

As a big dog lover, I found Life on the Leash a cute read and it was nice to read a novel based around positive dog training. I’m sure it’s exceedingly obvious to anyone even remotely involved in the dog training world that the main character’s least favourite person in the book, another dog trainer, was based on a real life TV personality. Lol. Although I found some parts quite funny and I really loved a few of the characters (Darnell and Maggie were great), there were just a few too many things that made me not quite love this book.

It was predictable. Reeeeeally predictable. I’m usually not mad keen on chick lit romance-y type books because of this very thing. They’re so often just the same old storyline underneath. I keep hoping I’ll find a few that will surprise me.

Cora’s total blindness when it came to Charlie’s smarminess. It made me want to roll my eyes, or throttle her.

There was a character who was clearly mentally ill and any ‘sympathy or understanding’ for her felt like it was thrown in just to make sure Cora didn’t sound completely horrible. Maybe it was just me, but mostly it seemed she was just belittled, gossiped about and portrayed as a terrible person for not giving her dog the best life. I just found that a bit off. I hate seeing animals neglected as much as the next person, but I would have liked to see a little more concern for this character’s welfare when she clearly wasn’t coping. To be honest, I find young adult books often address these sort of issues so well and adult books often seem to miss the mark spectacularly.

There were enough moments that I enjoyed the book, I just wish there had been something to the story I didn’t predict.